


Emerald City

by myoue



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Colour Theory, Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, Olympics, not actually at the olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 10:54:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17641415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myoue/pseuds/myoue
Summary: Victor had worn a green costume to the Paris Olympics when he was seventeen, and the Victor beside Yuuri right now is wearing green-tinted circular eyeglasses. Old habits die hard, he supposes?





	Emerald City

**Author's Note:**

> this is basically about the Ice Adolescence teaser that apparently mentions victor in a green costume.. GREEN... BLASPHEMOUS... i couldn't believe it... but then i started thinking more about it and decided hey it's not so bad. it could've been worse. like orange or something.
> 
> also, yeah i'm still here.

The Victor beside him is wearing green-tinted circular glasses while he simultaneously clicks his tongue. He’s resting his chin on the crutch of his elbow draped dramatically over the barrier like an ephemeral princess. One that wears shades.

“Can you try any harder?” he says without an ounce of excitement.

“I… I…” Yuuri gasps still exhausted from routine, gripping until the indents of his hand hurts. Breathing in and out. The breathless exclamation that comes next, slurring out of Yuuri, is less screams of fury and more quiet, cued frustration. The phone, the recorded routine, the unsynchronized jumps, all wobble unsightly together in his hand.

He could really feel it coursing through him and around him and within him—that if he had fallen at that time earlier it would surely tilt him for the rest of the program. It was a calculated risk. He had to cut it off. And if that was just at practice, is that any way to feel on the day of?

But instead of saying any of that, his shoulders come crumbling down. The words die on his lips. “Well, that’s mean of you,” he mumbles to Victor.

“You can’t,” Victor says, blowing up a piece of his hair, hitting a knee against the barrier, sinking down further, looking at him from the side. “That was supposed to be a rhetorical question. _Can_ you even try any harder?”

“Then you should say it like ‘ _could you have tried any harder than you already did?’_ Not so blunt like...” He breathes again impatiently, taking a step back. “No, never mind. Even that is…”

“Okay, my bad.”

“I don’t want to put words in your mouth, though. Is that what you meant to say? Or am I just rephrasing it to hear what I want to hear?”

Yuuri is suddenly knocked down by an arm slinging around his neck, until it’s forced him to crunch forward, his chin level with Victor’s on the hard, cold metal barrier and the waft of ice dust tickling his nose.

“ _Yuuri_ ,” comes Victor’s slow, sensual words in Yuuri’s ear. “Can you see what I see?” At four o’clock in the afternoon, there’s nothing and no one in front of them but the great white expanse of marked up ice.

“Is it all the hard work my boots have done to this pretty surface with nothing to show for it?” Yuuri mutters.

Victor shakes his head. His sigh is an octave even higher. “You don’t see it.”

“See what? Sorry. Can you be a little clearer?”

“Hmmmm…” Victor makes a show of demonstrably wracking his brain for a more understandable tone through closing his eyes and the soft tapping of a finger against his cheek. His other arm nudges Yuuri’s shoulder closer to him in the process. Their hips touch. The whole length of their legs touch. It’s another one of those times Yuuri finds himself so very at a loss of what Victor’s trying to tell him, more so than normal. It’s not a cultural or language barrier inconsistency, it’s simply—being on two different planes at two different spaces of time. There’s an uncanny amount of guesswork when it comes to the world’s number one most bachelor coach.

“Come.” Victor rubs an encouraging thumb into Yuuri’s shoulder. The grin spreading suavely across his face looks the combination of inspired and scary. “Let’s go back to the house. I want to show you something.”

Yuuri collapses, sighing, on the verge of sobbing. His forehead hits the ledge as Victor lets go of him and stands up. “You!” Yuuri seethes, throwing him a glare.

“Me?” Victor says, looking away to the ceiling innocently.

“Sometimes, I just don’t get it. You’re so…”

“So?”

“So…”

Unbelievable.

Unpredictable.

Unprecedented.

“So… annoying?” Victor’s tone is pouting. He’s really throwing that at Yuuri, from all the times he’s heard that said to him—one too many times throughout his life. That he has weird tendencies. That he doesn’t have boundaries. He doesn’t know anything. They gossip. Question all his marks. Picture him stupid and happy along with too much liberal propaganda.

Yuuri’s lip wavers, keeping his hand on a firm grip around his phone that, having finished the video long ago, had stopped and shut off. His glasses are on the ledge somewhere else far and out of reach and he doesn’t remember at all where they are. If Victor had asked him to do something silly like putting on his non-prescription emerald sunglasses, it would make absolutely no difference. He wouldn’t be able to see it either way.

Yuuri reaches an arm out forward, playfully nudges the bottom edge of Victor’s sunglasses with the side of a finger.

Then—turning himself around to the side, ah, there’s suddenly something interesting way over there, away from here and out of reach. Something sparkling and important. His glasses. He must go and fetch them.

And Victor, taking Yuuri happily by the arm and beginning to lead them both there, has an almost gleeful satisfaction on his face. He takes such pride in being Yuuri Katsuki’s coach. He wouldn’t trade this for the world. Not for anything. Not for everything. Victor leans deeply into him. And Yuuri squeezes Victor’s arm back with a pressured tenderness.

-

Victor sits behind him on the floor later in the evening with Yuuri practically in his lap, legs spread, leaning back against the side of the bed. “It’s not like you to be so depressed and just give up on things.”

“It’s very like me to be depressed,” Yuuri says as a matter of fact, rolling his head back onto Victor’s shoulder and swimming his arms into the large space of his sweater. Victor hugs around his middle, feeling warm and cozy. And if Yuuri could, he would ask Victor to never let him go, ever.

“Don’t joke about that,” Victor says seriously.

“I’m always extremely serious.”

Victor brings a hand up to squeeze Yuuri’s cheeks together as he nods towards the TV before them.

At his press of the spacebar attached to Yuuri’s old and falling apart Macbook Air connected to the side of the chunky hand-me-down television from the year 2002, the screen flickers to play a smaller, tinier Victor with longer hair and leaner limbs. His silver is more cleanly pulled back into a ponytail, no loose strands, unlike the crude state it always seems to find itself in now, especially now, when Yuuri tends to become mindless and bored with his hands while Victor scours YouTube for the most iconic scenes in his career.

“I’ve already seen this...” Yuuri says because it’s obvious his very character is being questioned. “A million…”

“A million times,” Victor agrees. He waves the remote towards the TV where the tinier him blows kisses to the crowd. “Look at him! This guy! He was so brilliant, so charming. What a cocky brat. Championship after championship. Gold upon gold upon gold. Solidified legendary status. Photoshoots with Dior Homme. He sets his first world record and he becomes obnoxious. A few more notches of confidence and now he’s this beautiful, realizing fantasy to you and thousands, nay, millions of young boys everywhere just finding their way in this world that’s anything but straight—”

“Victor.”

“...Forward.”

“You don’t have to bring all that up. I don’t want to know what those other boys were doing.”

Nothing good.

“The Paris Olympics!” Victor announces once more, brandishing an arm out in front of the both of them. “The _City of Love_. Where it all started. I was—”

“Seventeen years old. Your world debut,” Yuuri parrots off, bringing his knees up, watching glossy-eyed at the screen while Victor’s arm falters. Yuuri can’t help the small smile he tries to hide away. “Just a kid back then. Before any of this. Back then, people kept saying _who is this sparkling kid that’s come out of nowhere?_ You weren’t a winner but you were oh so close. And you were practically there. To them, and, well, to me, too, you were the most eye catching one there. It’s like the final score didn’t even matter. You’d made your mark.”

“I was catching _your_ eye?” Victor says with emphasis, rounding a palm over Yuuri’s knee while the other scrolls along the trackpad of the laptop on the floor.

“It was that green outfit. _Green_. Of all things,” Yuuri huffs like the colour and the fluffy ruffles along with it had personally accosted him in a previous life. He stares at the rolling lines on the TV with disdain. “Do you see the amount of glitter here? Oh my god. Look at this. Look at you. You were drenched in it. They still tell stories about it to this day. Really, I can’t believe you debuted with green. The sparkle—okay. But the green!”

“You’re really stuck on the green.”

“Well, the glitz is what first catches your eye. But the green is what makes you think.”

“Is that so?”

“It was just so out there.”

“Mmmm. To me it was just a colour.”

“Like any other,” Yuuri says, looking towards the ceiling dramatically, disbelieving.

“I’m hungry! Let’s go downstairs, darling~!”

-

They’re in the kitchen now, Victor’s arm in his.

The rest of the Katsuki household have doings elsewhere, idly watching TV, cleaning the snow off the porch and making sure the old stone lamps outside can shine their brightest and clearest in the nighttime storm. They have a ritual. It’s considered outlandish to let the snow cover the lights too much. It’s a bad omen. Even if none of them have ever seen such an omen or any specific ghost to warrant going out where the snow is blowing sideways. They’ve tried to stop Mr. Katsuki before, insisting the cold is worse than simply being haunted for generations to come, but it puts such a smile on his face to do it. Sometimes it isn’t always about superstition. He winks every time he says that. And it’s probably why he’s more toned than Victor at twice his age. Victor’s seen him in the bath.

“Colour is really important to me.” Yuuri holds his arm out, where his washed out navy blue sweater hangs oversized over the length of his hand where he reaches for a snack. He has the fridge door wide open, with Victor hanging off his shoulder. “I couldn’t see myself wearing green. Somehow, I feel like if I wear just anything then my performance will be just anything. Maybe I’m stubborn. Maybe I can’t branch out. I define myself by my favourite colour. I can’t move on at all.”

Before he can grab anything, his long sleeve is eventually pulled back up to his elbow by Victor to reveal the ends of his fingertips. His skin prickles with the cool air. Those fingers, though, are held up delicately in Victor’s hand to inspect like a thin butterfly specimen, turning every which way as if there’s something there to see, before being brought to his lips to kiss gently. Victor's eyelashes flutter. “That’s what I like about you, Yuuri.”

“Eh?”

“I’ve always found you so attractive, Yuuri. You’re consistent and true to who you are. I don’t even have a favourite colour. I’m practically colourless. Sometimes I don’t even know how to act. Not like you.”

“We’re letting all the cold air out of the fridge,” Yuuri reminds him as they stand there in the middle of the kitchen. Though, it's not as chilly as it could be with Victor, big and encompassing, wrapped around him. 

Victor tilts his head. “I really did just choose it to choose it. The colour, I mean.”

“These things are supposed to be taken more seriously. It’s serious business,” Yuuri says, reaching for a leftover slice of celebration cake with saran wrap taped over it. It’s a white cheesecake, light and fluffy and still cute even though it’s over a couple days old. “Especially on you… every choice you make is going to be scrutinized. They’ll write essays on your lip gloss.”

“Really? At this hour, Yuuri?” Victor pinches the edge of the ceramic plate while Yuuri holds it.

“And being who you are is serious business, too.” Yuuri tilts his head back to look diagonally at Victor, bouncing the plate in his hand. “The only way you can stop me from eating this is if you take it from me.”

That’s a threat. And a serious one at that.

“I wish I could worry more about my weight...” Victor says sadly, brushing a soft and aimless hand through Yuuri’s hair while willingly taking the plate from him with his other, “...half as much as I’m always worrying about yours.”

“That’s the difference between you and me, I think,” Yuuri says in contemplation. “I worry about absolutely anything and everything. I start and then I don’t stop. I keep on doing it like a fool, worrying and worrying. I have this feeling like, for example, if I decide _not_ to eat this cake then I'll regret it for sure if someone else eats it. Or if I decide to wear green, then it just won't feel right… ugh. It's the end of the world now. There's nothing left except for you and me, not even greenery. Maybe there's not even you. And at that point, what will become of me?”

“What will?”

“Exactly. Isn’t this so stupid? I'm going crazy all the time and haven’t figured out where to draw the line yet. I guess... it's that I linger too long on things that don’t mean anything, more so than others do.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“I think it is.”

“ _No,_ it’s not. Can we get a fork for this, please?”

-

Once Victor gets a fork, they move back to the living room, still stubbornly attached at the hip and the shoulder, until they have to reluctantly separate to opposite sides of the kotatsu. They stick their legs under the comfort of thick silken plaid blanket that replaces the warmth again as a heavy lump against their legs. The plate with cake is placed in the middle of the table and Victor unwraps it, sticking his fork in for the first bite.

Their calves all the way to their toes touch gently underneath the table. Yuuri’s foot slides idly against Victor’s, accidentally on purpose but who really knows for sure, while he lowers his chin to the table, regarding Victor with a gaze. He’s sleepy but doesn’t want to sleep. Though, pulling the blanket around himself into more of a burrito helps with the coziness but not at all with not wanting to fall asleep. He nearly succumbs as his eyes fall closed. “You know... on that day after your performance... they asked you for a statement. And your statements—you know, for some reason, you’re always so, so, so cool when you make statements.”

“Yeah? When I get all political?” Victor says, cheeks full of soft cake before holding out the fork. “Want some? It’s yours, after all! Don’t leave me hanging!”

Yuuri tries to make a face, squinting unsurely, that hopefully communicates something like _maybe, possibly, not now though, save me the last piece_. He grumbles. Or rather his stomach does. “In all my years of life. I remember one of the things you’d said was that green was earthy and humble and one of your favourite colours. You wanted to wear it with pride.”

“Hmmmmm, really?” Victor muses, reminiscing.

Yuuri’s eyes are half-closed but they widen when Victor halves the entire slice of cake again and downs it in one go. Oh my god, he wants to say.

“In another world, you would be a reporter and you would be the one asking me questions,” Victor says playfully, waving the fork around like it's an observable truth. “Ask me that one again. I want to answer properly this time.”

Just this one time, Yuuri’ll bite. “What’s the inspiration behind your costume on this day of the 2006 Paris Olympics, O Skating Legend Victor Nikiforov?”

Victor clears his throat dramatically. “Green is a sign of growth. It’s the mark of good health and nature and... hm... green traffic lights! I want to show everyone how much I’ve grown, to both my old and new fans. Just like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, it shines like jewels and its brilliance and glory cannot be dimmed except when wearing the right shades. Green is pleasant. And slimming. And it means _go_ , not stop or slow down or proceed with caution if you cannot make a safe and complete stop.”

“Do you know what the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz is supposed to represent?”

Victor smiles, pushing the plate with the last piece of cake towards Yuuri. “Don’t shatter my seventeen year old hopes and dreams, please.”

-

They’re back upstairs now, getting ready for bed.

Yuuri had truly and utterly failed in his routine of not eating anything three hours before sleep. Normally, Victor’s pretty hard on him for stuff like that. But seeing as he sort of took part in it... as long as Yuuri doesn’t make a habit of it. That’s what matters, right? Consistency.

At this point, Yuuri is twisted around completely in Victor’s lap in bed, being a complete bother while Victor’s trying to power down with his phone in his hand, looking at the news, Instagram, things tagged with Yuuri, news about Yuuri. Watching for any little change in his eyes or subtle shift in his expression as the blue lights up his face—maybe it’s weird to pry Victor like this.

“And the following year,” Yuuri whispers, pushing his face before the phone in Victor’s hand, “You had on the black one with the lace mesh and the crystals. It was so gawky, even more than the last one. I couldn’t believe it. I’d watched you in it like you had both lost your mind and walked down from heaven.”

Yuuri presses his lips together. Victor, distracted now, looks over at him with absolute intrigue.

“Yes?”

“You’d said to the press that black was cool and sexy and your favourite colour. Everyone took you at your word.”

“Black was definitely slimming for me.”

“The year after that, you had on that red that looked so princely. You’d said it was brilliant and fiery and that red was your favourite colour. Are you seeing a pattern here?”

Yuuri’s hands don’t know where to be. One of Victor’s finds its place along Yuuri’s waist, where the bone dips and Victor reminds him that he’s still slender even after indulging every so often. He doesn’t think Victor even notices it’s there. But he’s mindlessly tangling their legs together under the blanket in the way they had been tangled under the kotatsu just earlier and Victor holds him in the way he’d been held so close and so dear earlier still.

“So?” he says.

“Yellow, blue, white, purple. Did you think people wouldn’t have noticed?” Yuuri says with an upward lilt, trailing now the back of his hand—his knuckles and the edges of his fingertips, the ones Victor had kissed just earlier—up the collar of one warm, lazily-tied together forest green yukata.

“I know where you’re going with this,” Victor starts, nose twitching, cheeks flushing as he lets Yuuri lay across him with more and more of his weight. “Those were actually all my favourite colours during their respective years, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh, I know.”

“You do, do you?”

Certain feelings are swirling beneath the pads of Yuuri’s fingers, forming an itch he wants to badly indulge in.

“ _So_ ,” Yuuri accentuates, coming finally to his point, “You’re not colourless. You’re full of colour. You’re so colourful. So incredible. So beautiful. Brilliant. Evergreen.”

“Yuuri, you’re the type to get drunk off sixteen flutes of champagne and one measly slice of cake.”

“So! That’s-that’s what you get for letting me have it,” Yuuri retorts with falling cadence, slipping back further into Victor’s arms where reality starts to become more a hazy daydream.

A sigh comes out of Yuuri then, one that’s not at all filled with contempt for bringing back terrible sordid memories of his younger, stupider, more immature self at social events asking too much of him. No. Rather, his sigh is more in solemn acceptance that the past is the past. Not necessarily immutable but not worth losing sleep over. Maybe, just maybe, it’s something they both have to shake hands with, acknowledge with no regrets, and plainly—get over.

The video is as much Victor right now as last-place-Grand-Prix-Banquet Yuuri is Yuuri today. Parts are still there. The similarities may be scrutinized, details and minutiae counted, and soul intact. But it's a path and a gradient to who they have become today. Perhaps, all they can do is have faith in each other for now, for each and every moment from this time onward. To just keep moving. Forward, forward, forward.

“I’m getting tired...” Yuuri slurs, his eyes feeling tense and pulled. Victor’s chest is warmth against his back.

“Shh, shhh. Now you see it. Tomorrow, you’ll see what I see,” Victor coos.

A hand joins the warm and comfortable feeling, pressing flat against Yuuri’s forehead, massaging the roots of his hair to aid in his sleep. It’s soothing and nice. Victor really makes it feel even more impossible to stay awake.

Yuuri squints through the dim room. “Huh… really...”

“Hm?”

“Eh?”

“Okay, sleep for real now!” Victor commands in his soft indoor voice. He pulls the blanket over them, patting a hand down over top. “We have an early start tomorrow. No skipping practice. I’ll make sure to wake you up.”

“Okay…”

Sometime later in the night Victor will put him properly to bed, but for now they’ll stay like this—Yuuri being warm, cozy, comfortable lying back against Victor in support.

This coach side of Victor is always right when it comes to this, of course. He’s not very good at enforcing diet control or the number of daily kilometres to run or explaining how to rightly fire off an axel without using the words “ _something like that_.” They’ll have their disagreements and their bad feeling days. But if there’s ever a time where Yuuri’s obliged to be in agreement, it’s when it’s about going in to practice the sport they both love the most. Somehow things always work out.

Yuuri is about to drift off, even with the faint light just above from Victor’s phone resting gently against his head. “Hey," he mumbles in a last word to Victor, "I didn’t say this earlier… but we _both_ modelled for Dior Homme.”

Victor’s subsequent laugh after that is floating and lovely, light but rumbly against Yuuri. If anything, Yuuri could all but be totally imagining this conversation at this point.

In the dark of the night, Victor finally decides to turn off his phone, chucking it to the side, and rolling Yuuri over in bed, wrapping his arms around him. Yuuri can hear the smile in Victor’s voice that just about has him waning. “You’re so right. That’s exactly the sort of thing I love to hear from you, darling.”

**Author's Note:**

> “...everyone in the Emerald City is made to wear green-tinted eyeglasses; this is explained as an effort to protect their eyes from the "brightness and glory" of the city, but in effect makes everything appear green when it is, in fact, "no more green than any other city".”


End file.
